Today, we’re proud to launch Stripe Connect, which adds two important new capabilities to Stripe: a straightforward way for sites to enable payments for their users, and a seamless mechanism for Stripe users to securely share their data with other services.

Stripe for your users

Some of the most innovative businesses on the internet help others become sellers: store builders, website creators, marketplaces, and many more. In the past, figuring out how to make payments work has been a big barrier to building these kinds of companies—there hasn’t been any good way to immediately facilitate credit card transactions for sellers.

And yet these sellers—the platforms’ users—are often the people who most need a simple way to accept payments online. They’re the people just starting out, focused on getting their business off the ground. By integrating Stripe Connect and having users link with a Stripe account, any service can enable their users to start accepting payments in minutes. This is a big change, and by streamlining this process, we hope to help increase the number of people selling online.

Unlocking data

Stripe Connect also enables people already receiving payments with Stripe to link their accounts with other services, making it straightforward for developers to build rich tools that integrate payments data. Anyone using Stripe today can already export their data in CSV or JSON. Stripe Connect facilitates secure sharing of this data with third-party applications. Users can grant either read-write or read-only access to their data, and can revoke the authorization at any time.

Up to now, a business’s transaction data has usually remained siloed and inaccessible. We think it should be easy to safely share payments information with accounting software, analytics tools, and CRM systems—imagine tools that magically generate a tax return, make it easy to tie your web analytics to your purchases, or that show a user’s pricing tier in your customer support system.

Since we can't tackle every conceivable use-case ourselves, we want to encourage an ecosystem where anyone can build applications that leverage Stripe data.

Building Stripe Connect

Fundamentally, Stripe Connect is a way for sellers to link their Stripe accounts with third-party services. It’s built on OAuth, the industry-standard federated login mechanism. However, unlike most OAuth implementations, we’ve also made it easy to create an account during the authentication process, since many people may not already have Stripe accounts.

Stripe Connect has been in beta for several months now. During that time, many companies have integrated its capabilities. These include ShopLocket, Shopify, Skillshare, Wufoo, Ballpark, Desktime, and SumAll. We deeply appreciate the feedback we’ve received from all of our beta users—they’ve shaped the product you see. We look forward to their launch of their integrations.

We’re still in the early days of figuring out the scope of commerce on the internet. At Stripe, we spend our time thinking about how to build better tools for the online economy. Stripe Connect brings some new possibilities to the web, and we can’t wait to see what people build with it.